The use, if use it may be styled, of sporting, or fighting dogs, is
now a mere nothing to what it once was. There are many sports--an
appellation of many a brute cruelty--which have become extinct,
some of them long extinct. Herds of bears, for instance, were once
maintained in this country, merely to be baited by dogs. It was even
a part of royal merry-making. It was a sport altogether congenial
to the spirit of Henry VIII.; and when his daughter, then Queen Mary,
visited her sister Elizabeth at Hatfield House, now the residence
of the Marquess of Salisbury, there was a bear-baiting for their
delectation--_after mass_. Queen Elizabeth, on her accession to the
throne, seems to have been very partial to the baiting of bears and
of bulls; for she not unfrequently welcomed a foreign ambassador with
such exhibitions. The historians of the day intimate--they dared do
no more--that Elizabeth affected these rough sports the most in the
decline of life, when she wished to seem still sprightly, active, and
healthful, in the eyes of her courtiers and her subjects. Laneham,
whose veracity has not been impeached--though Sir Walter Scott has
pronounced him to be as thorough a coxcomb as ever blotted paper--thus
describes a bear-bait in presence of the Queen, and after quoting his
description I gladly leave the subject. I make the citation in order to
show and contrast the former with the present use of sporting dogs.
“It was a sport very pleasant to see the bear, with his pink eyes
leering after his enemies, approach; the nimbleness and wait of the
dog to take his advantage; and the force and experience of the bear
again to avoid his assaults: if he were bitten in one place, how he
would pinch in another to get free; that if he were taken once, then
by what shift with biting, with clawing, with roaring with tossing and
tumbling, he would work and wind himself from them; and, when he was
loose, to shake his ears twice or thrice, with the blood and the slaver
hanging about his physiognomy.”
The suffering which constituted the great delight of the _sport_ was
even worse than this, in bull-baiting, for the bull gored or tossed the
dogs to death more frequently than the bear worried or crushed them.
The principal place for the carrying on of these barbarities was
at Paris Garden, not far from St. Saviour’s Church, Southwark. The
clamour, and wrangling, and reviling, with and without blows, at these
places, gave a proverbial expression to the language. “The place was
like a bear-garden,” for “gardens” they were called. These pastimes
beguiled the _Sunday_ afternoons more than any other time, and were
among the chief delights of the people, “until,” writes Dr. Henry,
collating the opinions of the historians of the day, “until the refined
amusements of the drama, possessing themselves by degrees of the public
taste, if they did not mend the morals of the age, at least forced
brutal barbarity to quit the stage.”
Of this sport in Queen Anne’s days, Strutt’s industry has collected
advertisements telling of bear and bull-baiting at Hockley-in-the-Hole,
and “Tuttle”-fields, Westminster, and of dog-fights at the same places.
Marylebone was another locality famous for these pastimes, and for its
breed of mastiffs, which dogs were most used for baiting the bears,
whilst bull-dogs were the antagonists of the bull. Gay, who was a
sufficiently close observer, and a close observer of street-life too,
as is well shown in his “Trivia,” specifies these localities in one of
his fables:--
“Both Hockley-hole and Mary-bone
The combats of my dog have known.”
Hockley-hole was not far from Smithfield-market.
In the same localities the practice of these sports lingered, becoming
less and less every year, until about the middle of the last century.
In the country, bull-baiting was practised twenty times more commonly
than bear-baiting; for bulls were plentiful, and bears were not. There
are, perhaps, none of our older country towns without the relic of
its bull-ring--a strong iron ring inserted into a large stone in the
pavement, to which the baited bull was tied; or a knowledge of the site
where the bull-ring was. The deeds of the baiting-dogs were long talked
of by the vulgar. These sports, and the dog-fights, maintained the
great demand for sporting dogs in former times.
The only sporting dogs now in request--apart, of course, from hunting
and shooting (remnants of the old barbarous delight in torture or
slaughter), for I am treating only of the street-trade, to which
fox-hounds, harriers, pointers, setters, cockers, &c., &c., are
unknown--are terriers and bull-terriers. Bull-dogs cannot now be
classed as sporting, but only as fancy dogs, for they are not good
fighters, I was informed, one with another, their mouths being too
small.
The way in which the sale of sporting dogs is connected with
street-traffic is in this wise: Occasionally a sporting-dog is offered
for sale in the streets, and then, of course, the trade is direct. At
other times, gentlemen buying or pricing the smaller dogs, ask the cost
of a bull-dog, or a bull-terrier or rat-terrier, and the street-seller
at once offers to supply them, and either conducts them to a
dog-dealer’s, with whom he may be commercially connected, and where
they can purchase those dogs, or he waits upon them at their residences
with some “likely animals.” A dog-dealer told me that he hardly knew
what made many gentlemen so fond of bull-dogs, and they were “the
fonder on ’em the more blackguarder and varmint-looking the creatures
was,” although now they were useless for sport, and the great praise of
a bull-dog, “never flew but at head in his life,” was no longer to be
given to him, as there were no bulls at whose heads he could now fly.
Another dog-dealer informed me--with what truth as to the judgment
concerning horses I do not know, but no doubt with accuracy as
to the purchase of the dogs--that Ibrahim Pacha, when in London,
thought little of the horses which he saw, but was delighted with the
bull-dogs, “and he weren’t so werry unlike one in the face hisself,”
was said at the time by some of the fancy. Ibrahim, it seems, bought
two of the finest and largest bull-dogs in London, of Bill George,
giving no less than 70_l._ for the twain. The bull-dogs now sold by the
street-folk, or through their agency in the way I have described, are
from 5_l._ to 25_l._ each. The bull-terriers, of the best blood, are
about the same price, or perhaps 10 to 15 per cent. lower, and rarely
attaining the tip-top price.
The bull-terriers, as I have stated, are now the chief fighting-dogs,
but the patrons of those combats--of those small imitations of the
savage tastes of the Roman Colosseum, may deplore the decay of the
amusement. From the beginning, until well on to the termination of
the last century, it was not uncommon to see announcements of “twenty
dogs to fight for a collar,” though such advertisements were far more
common at the commencement than towards the close of the century. Until
within these twelve years, indeed, dog-matches were not unfrequent
in London, and the favourite time for the regalement was on Sunday
mornings. There were dog-pits in Westminster, and elsewhere, to which
the admission was not very easy, for only known persons were allowed
to enter. The expense was considerable, the risk of punishment was not
a trifle, and it is evident that this Sunday game was _not supported
by the poor or working classes_. Now dog-fights are rare. “There’s
not any public dog-fights,” I was told, “and very seldom any in a pit
at a public-house, but there’s a good deal of it, I know, _at the
private houses of the nobs_.” I may observe that “the nobs” is a common
designation for the rich among these sporting people.
There are, however, occasionally dog-fights in a sporting-house, and
the order of the combat is thus described to me: “We’ll say now that
it’s a scratch fight; two dogs have each their corner of a pit, and
they’re set to fight. They’ll fight on till they go down together, and
then if one leave hold, he’s sponged. Then they fight again. If a dog
has the worst of it he mustn’t be picked up, but if he gets into his
corner, then he can stay for as long as may be agreed upon, minute
or half-minute time, or more than a minute. If a dog won’t go to the
scratch out of his corner, he loses the fight. If they fight on, why to
settle it, one must be killed--though that very seldom happens, for if
a dog’s very much punished, he creeps to his corner and don’t come out
to time, and so the fight’s settled. Sometimes it’s agreed beforehand,
that the master of a dog may give in for him; sometimes that isn’t to
be allowed; but there’s next to nothing of this now, unless it’s in
private among the nobs.”
It has been said that a sportsman--perhaps in the relations of life
a benevolent man--when he has failed to kill a grouse or pheasant
outright, and proceeds to grasp the fluttering and agonised bird and
smash its skull against the barrel of his gun, reconciles himself to
the sufferings he inflicts by the _pride of art_, the consciousness of
skill--he has brought down his bird at a long shot; that, too, when he
cares nothing for the possession of the bird. The same feeling hardens
him against the most piteous, woman-like cry of the hare, so shot that
it cannot run. Be this as it may, it cannot be urged that in matching
a favourite dog there can be any such feeling to destroy the sympathy.
The men who thus amuse themselves are then utterly insensible to any
pang at the infliction of pain upon animals, witnessing the infliction
of it merely for a passing excitement: and in this insensibility the
whole race who cater to such recreations of the wealthy, as well as
the wealthy themselves, participate. There is another feeling too at
work, and one proper to the sporting character--every man of this class
considers the glories of his horse or his dog his own, a feeling very
dear to selfishness.
The main sport now, however, in which dogs are the agents is
rat-hunting. It is called hunting, but as the rats are all confined in
a pit it is more like mere killing. Of this sport I have given some
account under the head of rat-catching. The dogs used are all terriers,
and are often the property of the street-sellers. The most accomplished
of this terrier race was the famous dog Billy, the eclipse of the rat
pit. He is now enshrined--for a stuffed carcase is all that remains
of Billy--in a case in the possession of Charley Heslop of the Seven
Bells behind St. Giles’s Church, with whom Billy lived and died. His
great feat was that he killed 100 rats in five minutes. I understand,
however, that it is still a moot point in the sporting world, whether
Billy did or did not exceed the five minutes by a very few seconds. A
merely average terrier will easily kill fifty rats in a pit in eight
minutes, but many far exceed such a number. One dealer told me that
he would back a terrier bitch which did not weigh 12 lbs. to kill 100
rats in six minutes. The price of these dogs ranges with that of the
bull-terriers.
The passion for rat-hunting is evidently on the increase, and seems to
have attained the popularity once vouchsafed to cock-fighting. There
are now about seventy regular pits in London, besides a few that are
run up for temporary purposes. The landlord of a house in the Borough,
familiar with these sports, told me that they would soon have to breed
rats for a sufficient supply!
But it is not for the encounter with dogs alone, the issue being that
so many rats shall be killed in a given time, that these vermin are
becoming a trade commodity. Another use for them is announced in the
following card:--